Fish Out of Water
by Octavius
Summary: An "Itachi-centric sea shanty" one-shot. Kisame/Itachi. Written as a gift fic for Ronsard.


**Fish Out of Water**

They're walking through a stinking fish market somewhere in Mist country. Men are dragging up Bluefin tuna on hydraulic winches and turning them this way and that with hooks. Kisame gives the metallic bodies a look. Easily 200 pounds, sleek, mercurial and being cut and frozen on a packing room floor. He shakes his head.

"Hey, Itachi-san what do'ya say it tuna tonight, eh?" But Itachi, the bastard, doesn't even listen just keeps striding on across the rows of white carcasses, and Kisame's content to trail in his wake for now.

The thing about being Itachi's partner was that it was easier than it looked. You just sat around, hit when you were supposed to, carried a body somewhere, maimed a body in some place or places, and put up with the occasional glare. You whored when you wanted to and when you liked without any religious mumbo-jumbo or whiny art accompaniment. And there are moments...moments like when Itachi coaxes the door to the back room open and slips in with all the assurance of the devil.

His grin gets wider when he hears furniture crash. The workers in the warehouse pause midmotion and from the room Kisame hears cursing, and in the background the _kuchunkchunkchunk_ of the hydraulic lift struggling with the load, chains straining. Then the work starts up again, the swing of the picks and arc of the fisherman's back continuing downward and the dull wet packing noises are even louder than before. The shouting has gone quiet too, and when he gets inside he sees why.

It's the seedy sort of back room paneled in wood and grime, but he hadn't expected much from a Mist place. The overturned card table and the mismatched chairs holding corpses are about a fair approximation of the whole country. He shoulders Sameheda and grinds his sandal into the face of some fool on the floor. And Itachi is-he's-Sasori had commented once that it was a pity that Itachi's hand-to-hand skill would die with him. He moves like a crane waiting patiently for a frog. Pausing and waiting. The frog in this case is some two-bit shinobi that managed to summon a shadow clone before Itachi broke his wrist, then turned smoothly and snapped the neck of the clone. Kisame sees the final move come even before the mist-nin does and clucks his tongue when the mist-nin gets his knife back in his own eye.

"Good one Itachi-san," he says applauding. Itachi gives him a look and heads towards the far wall. There's a body slumped there in the corner pinned with kunai through both shoulders, stuck tight like an ugly butterfly in a case. Itachi reaches for the teenager and forces his fingers his mouth, pulls him off the wall by his fucking jaw the way you would hook a carp out in the harbor. Kisame grimaces and tips one of the corpses out of a rattan chair so he can watch. The teenager's not any sort of looker, black hair and Kisame's own freaky teeth, but he's gone fishbelly white. There's red on the floor, under his chair, and on the walls, and there's going to be on Itachi's face.

"So," Itachi says conversationally while dragging the boy's head back to look him in the eye, "we heard the Yonbi is your grandfather. Where can we find him?"

Itachi sleeps for a day after the scene in the fish market. The wind hits the shanty on one side and the metal plates of the roof rattle softly. The insides are wood and stucco whitewashed, but what Kisame loves the most is the smell of the sea over the stench of the harbor and the pale forms of fishing boats in the bay roving like phantoms in the grey water. Even as a kid he remembers the Mist ocean like this. Deidara used to talk about the blue ocean and white sands and hot sun, but Kisame had just threatened to kill him until he shut up.

On their way back from tracking the whereabouts of the Yonbi they hear about the death of Orochimaru. The street is clustered with people, sea shacks crusted with salt and driftwood overhangs; all built along side streets leaning haphazardly against each other like old tin cans. A light rain is falling and turning the air humid, thick with the dull soured smell of the harbor and grease. Itachi stops and Kisame does the same by his side. His stomach does a lazy flip at the sight of Itachi's neck under his collar. But then Itachi turns, his eye following some invisible thread over the shacks and harbor, over the entire ocean to the dark haired brat on the other side. And it's been a long time since Kisame's seen that look-a certain awareness, like something coming out of deep hibernation. They say Amaterasu can burn through anything, but it's the coldest fire he's ever seen.

The thing is if he asked he knows Itachi would get down on his knees for him, just like he would have at 15 when they'd met. Even on the grimy floor of the little sea shanty, get his knees and his mouth dirty just for him, but it wouldn't mean anything. He's like those fish packed on ice back at the fish market mouth gaping, gills wide. He'd been hauled up by the winch and left struggling to breathe in the bottom of the boat. Starved of oxygen the pink insides of gills flimsy and cellophane, open and vulnerable. Even the meanest ugliest fucker had these places and he knows it's that same movement the same mouth gaping, cloudy-eyed focus he has on Itachi.

He'd fucked Itachi against the wall after they'd come back. Kisame had gripped Itachi's wrist as soon as the door had closed, crushing it in his hand. There were still teeth marks around his fingers from the teenager the day before, but Kisame had leaned forward and made his own, bit into the soft ball of Itachi's palm. If he looks now next to the door frame at waist level there is the faint impression of Itachi's backbone. Kisame puts his mouth to that space, opening and closing. Trying to breathe.

A/N: Not really much about the sea. More about fishing.

Mostly based around this quote: "And he piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the rage and hate felt by his whole race. If his chest had been a cannon, he would have shot his heart upon it"


End file.
